In an article that is long on indignation [...]]]> Are the myriad gobbledygook terms that so many B2B writers warn against really just “imaginary bogeyman punching bags”? Is compiling a list of words that are overused and vague akin to burning books? Do the people who make those lists simply want to look smarter than everyone else?

In an article that is long on indignation and short on specifics, Steven Parker this week made just those claims. Writing on B2Bbloggers.com, he argued that “one person’s gobbledygook is another person’s precise, and often technical or professional term.” Moreover, he said, the people who speak out against jargon are driven not by a desire for better writing, but by elitism and political correctness: “while people are forgiving of imprecise terms if they are current slang or very popular, they’re unforgiving if the words are politically incorrect, not socially ‘cool’ or out of favor. They want to ‘ban’ them, or whine about them.”

Oddly, Parker never specifies a single word incorrectly labeled as gobbledygook, and only indirectly suggests what list makers he is targeting.

Clearly the most prominent of such list makers in the B2B world is David Meerman Scott, who published The Gobbledygook Manifesto in 2006. As ranked by frequency of use in press releases, his top-ten offenders that year (he’s since updated it) included  the terms next generation, flexible, robust, world class, scalable, easy to use, cutting edge, well positioned, mission critical, and market leading. A rebuttal to Scott’s view that these words are marred by overuse and imprecision might be possible, but Parker never attempts it.

More oddly still, after trashing lists of gobbledygook, Parker comes up with his own—the “real gobbledygook”. So perhaps his objection is not so much to the making of gobbledygook lists as it is to the particular words included. His list is OK, apparently, but the others constitute an “uppity, homogenized sniff test.”

I think we can be more generous. Whether or not you agree with the judgments of a list maker, you can still learn from them. Even if people like Scott did want to ban objectionable words (a claim Parker never substantiates), it wouldn’t matter. The value lies not in the judgments, but in making us think about our writing and about the specific words we use.

Even on this point, however, Parker demurs. He concludes his post by asking whether you should worry at all about using slang or jargon. No, he answers: “You should not waste one minute thinking about it.”

Though I don’t find his argument compelling or convincing, let alone supported by evidence, I’m glad that he made it. He got me to think yet again about the words I use and the ones I avoid, and why. And for that, I’m grateful.

In his post,  he reports on an effort by PR strategist Adam Sherk to enumerate the frequency of 98 marketing buzzwords in current press releases.  As Sherk acknowledges, he [...]]]> A post today from Josh Gordon on words to avoid in content marketing gets to the heart of what content marketers must do: think like journalists.

In his post,  he reports on an effort by PR strategist Adam Sherk to enumerate the frequency of 98 marketing buzzwords in current press releases.  As Sherk acknowledges, he is building upon a list David Meerman Scott compiled last year of “top gobbledygook phrases used in 2008.”

Here are the top 12 offenders:

1. leader
2. leading
3. best
4. top
5. unique
6. great
7. solution
8. largest
9. innovative
10. innovator
11. award winning
12. exclusive

Now as Gordon notes, such words are bad enough when they appear in press releases. But in content marketing, they are disastrous. As he says, “when content marketing looks like a product promotion it gets ignored like a product promotion.”

For anyone trained in B2B journalism, the terms in the above list (and the remaining 86 in Shirk’s list) are obvious no-nos. Many B2B editors cut their teeth rewriting press releases for their publication’s product and services section. Their first lesson was almost always to remove any form of endorsement language. It might not be practical to personally review products, but it was an absolute obligation to remove any promotional overtones and stick to the facts in the release, even in supplier quotes. (Sadly, as advertising has gotten scarcer, editorial standards have gotten laxer, resulting in such over-the-top quotes as—really, I did not make this up—“the outstanding part quality produced is outstanding—just awesome.”)

Though it’s been said here before,  it’s worth repeating: If content marketing is to fulfill its promise, it must adopt a journalistic ethos. That can be done through PR or marketing people learning to think like journalists, or by hiring journalists. But one way or another, it must be done.

A while back, I lamented how social media seem to lead inevitably to the decline of editing and proofreading. I was given new hope this weekend, though, while listening to Leo Laporte’s podcast “This Week in Tech.” Towards the end, guest Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer and Boing-Boing co-publisher, [...]]]>

Doctorow: Make money with typos

A while back, I lamented how social media seem to lead inevitably to the decline of editing and proofreading. I was given new hope this weekend, though, while listening to Leo Laporte’s podcast “This Week in Tech.” Towards the end, guest Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer and Boing-Boing co-publisher, mentioned a publishing project that involved, among other things, offering readers incentives to alert him to typos.

Doctorow’s project, which he’s been documenting in his Publishers Weekly column, is a self-published short story collection called With a Little Help. His “freemium” model includes free e-books and audiobooks, donations, a print-on-demand (POD) paperback, a premium hardcover edition, advertisements, and a commission fee for a new short story.

Since this is a self-published project, Doctorow wants to keep expenses to a minimum, and that means no outlay for proofreading or copyediting. As he points out, the stories were all copyedited and proofread for their original publication in magazines, and his mother, a “king-hell proofer,” will help out. But the POD model offers a third option:

“Now, lots of people have used POD as a way of avoiding a lot of sunk costs in publishing ventures. But I want to see how far I can push it. With my previous books, my readers have sent in typos as they discovered them and I’ve fixed the electronic texts immediately, storing up lists of changes for my publisher to incorporate in future printings. But POD means that I can fix typos as soon as they’re reported, and what’s more, I can add an acknowledgment to the reader who caught it on the page where the correction appears, as a footnote. I have a feeling that readers will happily buy a second copy of the book in order to have a printing in which their name appears.”

As Doctorow put it on TWiT, he’s “monetized typos.”

The result is more likely to be a revenue trickle than a stream, and, if you took it seriously, it would give authors an incentive to include typos, or at least not to look for them too strenuously.

But the more meaningful exchange here is the payment Doctorow offers to his readers. By naming them in footnotes, he is rewarding them for finding errors.

Though it wouldn’t work in many forms of social media, this seems like a good tool for bloggers to employ. Of course, it requires the blogger to care enough to offer such an incentive. That comes naturally to a serious writer like Doctorow, but maybe not to the average blogger. It also requires a thick skin, something many writers manifestly lack.

So, in the spirit of Doctorow’s experimentation, I hereby offer a mention in my blog and a tweet to anyone who finds a typo or other error in my posts. If you’re a blogger, why not do the same?

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a project that involves reading a bunch of feature articles from a wide range of B2B publishers. It’s been, surprisingly, an inspiring experience.

Why the surprise? I guess because there’s so much gloom and doom surrounding the future of B2B publishing. The [...]]]>

Photo by Brenda Starr

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a project that involves reading a bunch of feature articles from a wide range of B2B publishers. It’s been, surprisingly, an inspiring experience.

Why the surprise? I guess because there’s so much gloom and doom surrounding the future of B2B publishing. The grim outlook makes it easy to forget just how much superb work is still being done by B2B journalists.

If content marketers hope to pick up the mantle of the writers and editors behind these endangered magazines, they will need to study the best and brightest of them (or better yet, hire them). Though there are probably more to be mined, I’ve found five key principles behind the best of the articles I read. By applying them to their own writing, content marketers can keep the B2B publishing flame burning brightly.

1. Prefer expert writers over experts who write. In the articles I reviewed, the authors were either professional writers (staff or freelance) or experts from industry. The best articles came from the professional writers, not the industry experts. Note that I am not arguing against using industry experts as writers. There are certain topics and contexts that demand it. But when you can, use expert writers instead.

2. If you write about your own product, it will sound like an ad. In a few cases, articles I read were written by people with a commercial interest in their topic. Their expertise was clear, but so was their bias.

No matter how objective you are, when you talk about your own product or service you will reveal your bias. That’s not a problem in itself. Passion is good (see point 5). If you believe in your product, you should show it, whether in your PR or your traditional marketing. But such bias runs counter to the spirit of B2B publishing that the best content marketing aspires to.

3. Give opposing points of view fair consideration. To be effective, a story needs to have some kind of conflict or tension. You can’t generate that with a straw man. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to lead your reader to prefer your point of view to the alternative, but you can’t do that if you don’t give the alternative its due. While the outstanding stories I read generally had a clear point of view, they made the most of the conflict they covered. You should do the same.

4. Share your purpose and be true to it. The best articles make it clear up front what they are aiming to tell you and why, and they stick fiercely to their aim throughout the whole story. The headlines, graphics, pull quotes, and other story elements all support that aim. Weaker articles don’t know what they’re about, or worse, try to hide it from the reader.

5. Show your passion. What really distinguishes the best B2B writers is their love of the topic. It’s not that the subject matter is central to their lives. It usually isn’t. Rather, it’s that they have an ability to dive into their assigned subject and adopt it with enthusiasm. True experts may have an enduring passion for their topic, but they often don’t know how to build off that passion and share it with the reader. And if you can’t share it with your readers, you won’t make a real impact on them.

As my reading reminded me, there are plenty of B2B publications that could learn a few things from the best of their breed. Those that don’t may not survive much longer. Worse yet, even the best B2B publishers may find that their excellence is not enough to save them. But if the benchmarks they set can inspire content marketers to achieve similar heights of content, they will not have excelled in vain.

Thanks to a Twitter lead from @TomPick, I came across an article by Devin Sugameli offering “5 Tips for More ReTweets.” Sugameli’s final tip for how to get more views of your blog posts was “Don’t [...]]]> My lizard brain, always scanning the horizon for reasons not to publish, got very excited yesterday.

Thanks to a Twitter lead from @TomPick, I came across an article by Devin Sugameli offering “5 Tips for More ReTweets.” Sugameli’s final tip for how to get more views of your blog posts was “Don’t publish before noon on Mondays!”

She continued:

Photo by MotleyPixel

A 2008 study looked at the best times and days to publish content. Software developer Jake Luciani found that writers who posted on Thursdays had the greatest success in terms of comments, votes, and inbound links. Outside of weekends, Mondays were the worst days. The best times to post were between 1 pm–3 pm (after lunch) or 5 pm–7 pm PST (after work).

To my lizard brain, the conclusion was obvious: only post on Thursdays during those two 2-hour periods. And of course, if I should happen to be doing something else at the time, I should probably wait until the next Thursday. . . .

Even the the higher-level parts of my brain would have to conclude from what Sugameli wrote that there are days and times of the week when you shouldn’t publish. Looking quickly at Marshall Kirkpatrick’s source article on ReadWriteWeb seemed to confirm that idea, given its headline: “Want That Post to Go Popular? Here’s The Best and Worst Times to Post It.”

However, a closer look at the article changed the picture. What Luciani examined was not when posts were published, but when they were submitted to social-media sites Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Mixx: “He determined the best days and times for a blog post to be submitted to those sites if its author wants it to receive the maximum number of votes, comments and inbound links.” As Kirkpatrick notes a bit later in his article, Luciani’s analysis is “tracking the time that the post is submitted to the news site—not when it was necessarily posted on the blog.”

On realizing this, my lizard brain, I’m happy to report, slunk glumly back into its lair.

The lesson, for me at least, is clear: Never delay publishing to your blog. If it’s ready, hit the publish button. (You may not want to publish in haste, exactly, as my headline suggests—but I couldn’t resist the allusion.)

By all means, time your promotional efforts carefully. Though Luciani didn’t apparently include Twitter (2008 was premature, no doubt), I imagine his findings apply there as well. And lest this post be construed as a criticism of Sugameli’s helpful tips, it isn’t—provided you apply her advice about timing to your tweets, not your blog posts.

Your lizard brain already has enough excuses to keep you from publishing. Don’t let the timing of your posts be another.

Any Internet search for advice on “writing for the Web” will produce thousands of advisories.  All of them are useful, but to judge from my recently concluded study of 50 B2B Web sites, their advice is widely ignored by e-news writers and editors

How does the news writing on your B2B site measure up? Using a [...]]]>

Any Internet search for advice on “writing for the Web” will produce thousands of advisories.  All of them are useful, but to judge from my recently concluded study of 50 B2B Web sites, their advice is widely ignored by e-news writers and editors

How does the news writing on your B2B site measure up? Using a simple “fix-it alert” scoring system can help you answer that question.

For the study, I analyzed 446 articles on the basis of eight factors I’ve found to be essential to effective e-news writing:

1. Impact. How important is the subject of the article to target readers? Is it of urgent interest, or is it just filler?
2. Enterprise. How much digging does the story represent? Is the article just a warmed-over press release, or did the writer seek out fresh information?
3. Direct quotes. Does the article include original, direct quotes from key news sources?
4. Fast-paced lead. How many words does it take to get to the key point of the story? Better leads get there in fewer words.
5. Readability. To assess this factor, I recommend the Fog Index. A Fog Index grade level is derived via a calculation involving average sentence length and words of three or more syllables. To ensure readability, the Fog Index grade level should not exceed 12.
6. Average sentence length. Although average sentence length is a component of the Fog Index, I’ve isolated it here because so many e-news writers thrive on endless sentences.
7. Article word count. In general, successful e-news stories are short, though the ideal length will vary from one Web site to another. My study is based on a preferred maximum length of 750 words.
8. Embedded links. Hyperlinks are what the Internet is all about. If your writer doesn’t work at least one link into the text of the story, it’s not a true e-news article.

These factors are fairly obvious and should not be subject to argument.  But for some reason, these editorial basics—particularly readability and average sentence length—seem to be a foreign language for the low-scoring sites I reviewed.

Calculating Fix-It Alert Scores

To highlight news-writing problems in the e-news reviews I do for publishing clients, I use what I call a “fix-it-alert” (FIA) calculation. Here’s an example of how you can use the FIA system to assess the quality of your news articles:

Let’s assume that you post ten e-news items per week. You would make up a chart, like the one in this article, rating each of the eight factors as follows:

• Impact: High, Medium, or Low.
• Enterprise: High, Medium, Low, or No. (Note: In my recently-completed study, two-thirds of the articles reviewed earned a “No.”)
• Quotes: The number of direct quotes obtained from sources.
• Lead: The number of words wasted before a key story point is reached.  For example, a lead value of -5 means it took five words to reach the take-away angle.
• Readability: The Fog Index grade level.
• Average Sentence Length (ASL). The average number of words per sentence in the article.
• Word Count: The total number of words in the article.
• Links: The number of embedded links in the article.

As you enter the ratings, boldface all entries that you consider to be unacceptable. There is no absolute measure of acceptability; it’s really up to you. In the chart I’ve included here, for example, I’ve chosen to boldface factors where the impact is low, the lead value is −15 or worse, the Fog Index is 13.0 or higher, and the average sentence is 25 words or longer.

Your last step is to calculate the FIA score: the percentage of boldfaced—that is, unacceptable—factors. In our example, we have a total of 80 ratings (10 articles multiplied by 8 factors). If you boldfaced 35 of those ratings, your overall FIA score is 35 divided by 80, or 43.7%. The lower the FIA score, the better.

A Fix-It Alert Example

The accompanying chart reflects actual results for a Web site e-news package of ten articles. Out of the 50 sites I reviewed, the resulting FIA score of 56.25% placed this one in 49th place.

As part of your evaluation process, establish yardsticks based on your existing editorial policy.  Usually, the first time you run this exercise, the resulting FIA score becomes a benchmark for establishing higher goals where warranted.

Obviously, it would be terrific if FIA for all factors could drop to 0%. But to start, you really want to address any factor where the average FIA exceeds 50%

In my experience, the weakest performance is likely to be in readability and average sentence length. In the accompanying chart, the FIA for both was 90%.  High FIA scores for these two categories–maybe not 90%, but still above 50%–were the rule for half of the 50 sites I reviewed.

(Why such long-windedness? Two key hurdles are apparently to blame: 1. Opening sentences using source-first, lead-second sequence.  2. Endless puffy quotes. In both cases, e-news writers clearly are allowing ponderous content from PR announcements to sneak into their articles unscathed.)

What FIA score should you shoot for? The answer will vary widely from one Web site to another. But in a follow-up e-news study just launched, I’ve found typical scores of 30% to 40%.  In the original study, the lowest FIA was 25.0%. Only five sites managed FIA scores below 30.0%. If your score is over 40%, it may be time to take action and start fixing it.

Howard Rauch is president of Editorial Solutions Inc., an editorial consulting practice specializing in B2B, and the 2002 recipient of ASBPE’s Lifetime Achievement Award.  Before launching Editorial Solutions in 1989, Rauch was VP/editorial director for B2B publisher Gralla Publications. He can be reached at howard@editsol.com.

The serial comma is that final one in a series of three or more items, as in the phrase “red, white, [...]]]> Though for me there is little schadenfreude in witnessing the decline and fall of newspapers, I do find one small cause for cheer in this otherwise unsettling spectacle: the potential resurgence of the serial comma.

The serial comma is that final one in a series of three or more items, as in the phrase “red, white, and blue.” (It is sometimes known by its detractors as the “Oxford” or “Harvard” comma, as if to imply that a preference for clarity is somehow elitist or purely academic.)

Most newspapers and their style guides have steadfastly resisted the serial comma. They prefer instead “red, white and blue.”

It’s often suggested that this resistance arose from a desire for typesetting efficiency, as New York Times editor Philip B. Corbett has said:

“I suspect that journalists’ aversion to the additional comma arose in the old days when setting type was laborious and expensive. If you already have an “and,” why bother with a comma, too? The practice persists, from habit and perhaps from the sense that fewer commas make prose seem more direct and rapid—qualities we journalists prize in our writing.”

As Corbett indicates, the argument against the serial comma boils down to this: You don’t need it, and it sounds fussy and ponderous.

Although I find that the serial comma sounds more natural, I can buy the argument that it often isn’t necessary for clarity. But even opponents of serialism recognize that, at times, the additional comma is essential.

And therein lies the problem. Many writers will fail to recognize those times, and clarity will suffer. Although the use of a serial comma can lead to ambiguity too, as Wikipedia evenhandedly points out,  I’ve found that ambiguities are more likely in its absence. So for me, consistent use of serial commas is the wiser policy. (For a longer and more convincing version of this argument, may I suggest the Grammar Girl?)

Opposition to the serial comma will not die out any time soon. Many newspaper writers and editor will hold on to their old habits, even as they exchange new media and venues for old. But the decline of newspapers as an institutional influence on writing gives me hope that the serial comma will make slow but steady gains in the new-media world.